A Dual Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network to Improve Long-Tail Performance for Shop Search in E-Commerce

Shop search has become an increasingly important service provided by Taobao, the China's largest e-commerce platform. By using shop search, a user can easily identify the desired shop that provides a full-scale of relevant items matching his information need. With the tremendous growth of users and shops, shop search faces several unique challenging problems: 1) many shop names do not fully express what they sell, i.e., the semantic gap between user query and shop name; 2) due to the lack of user interactions, it is difficult to deliver a good search result for the long-tail queries and retrieve long-tail shops that are highly relevant to a query.